Extracting and Understanding Call-to-actions of Push-Notifications

Push-notifications are a communication tool leveraged by many apps to disseminate information, engage with their user base and provide a means of encouraging users to take particular actions. The nuanced intent behind a push is not always distinguishable to the end-user at moments of delivery. This work explores the text content of notifications pushed by a number of prominent apps in the marketplace over the period of 463 days. We present a new ontology that defines notification Call-to-action (CTA) labels in use today. This facilitates greater understanding behind a push and is a step towards standardisation for marketing teams. Subsequently, we then present results of a notification dataset annotated with our CTA labels and propose and evaluate a CTA text classification task, which could facilitate improved solutions for both users subscribed to, and marketers creating, push-notifications.